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Talk:Millennium/@comment-5846899-20150622063358/@comment-12161342-20150622220605
As the surviving Black Plagues flee the battle by jumping to warp, the captain of the Io cracks a wide, evil grin, for he knows he will be the first captain to carry out a warp attack, and does not hesitate to give the corresponding orders. Locking on to the warp signals of the fleeing cruisers, the Io-class warship turns and charges its nacelles before disappearing to warp in an impossibly deep blue-black flash. The surviving cruisers have no reason to suspect what is about to happen next, since for as long as ships have been around, travelling faster than light via warp or any other means of propulsion has always been seen as a safe haven from the raging battles of the universe. It is almost cruel, in a way, what is about to happen to the unfortunate souls on board the fleeing ships, clinging to the soon-to-be-shattered notions of safety at FTL... Aboard the trailing Black Plague, which was the last one to enter warp, the relief of the bridge crew turns to confusion as strange readings start coming in, readings that make absolutely no sense. The bridge crew just cannot fathom why their warp field seems to be stretching and distorting, nor why the energy load on the ship is increasing drastically, threatening the entire power system's integrity. And then, it suddenly does make sense... as the horrified bridge crew watches from the viewports, their bubble seems to rip open from the outside, and from the gaping rent appears the same Io-class warship they were fleeing from, edging into the shattered sanctity of their warp bubble. The Io, its warp nacelles ringed by an impossibly intense indigo halo that is yet somehow darker than the blackest black, pulls up alongside the cruiser and malevolently swings its doomsday turrets towards the cruiser. The unfortunate bridge crew can only watch in horror, their instruments sparking and squealing out danger messages from the unprecedented power load on the system which has rendered them helpless. The captain of the cruiser utters a prayer to his specific deity, no doubt accompanied by those who are watching through viewports positioned to let them catch a glimpse of the Io, before the Io opens fire. Though it is only shots from several doomsday guns, the overstressed power supply of the cruiser collapses completely and its half of the the warp bubble collapses onto it, the tidal forces rending it asunder and scattering its debris into realspace at close to the speed of light. Such is the demise of several more of the chain of fleeing cruisers; however, by the time the fourth goes down to the Io, the rest know something has gone horribly, irrevocably wrong. Though they cannot easily communicate, they can tell as, one by one, the telemetry data of their trailing bretheren disappears from the displays, creeping slowly from the rear to the leading ships, one by one, each within anywhere between a half a minute and a minute of the one before. The crews of the leading ships are gripped by confusion and terror, for they know not what is destroying them in the safest haven they know, warp. Some ships charge their weapons, intending to confront whatever it may be, but it is of no use once the Io comes in and offloads some of its warp energy requirements onto them, straining their electrical system to the breaking points and rendering any resistance impossible. At least two cruisers weren't destroyed by enemy fire at all; rather, they were the ones who raged hardest against their impending eternal night and, paying no heed to their systems, got off any shots they could from whatever they had charged beforehand. These ships were destroyed by their own resistance, the very act of firing causing their reactors to overload, go critical, and melt down, leaving the crew to spend their final moments getting thrown around inside an unlit, speeding metal tomb, with no power to provide either lighting, gravity, or inertial dampening, before the warp bubble's collapse inevitably tore them apart and mercifully ended their pain for good. Soon, there is but two left, and then only one, and the crew of the final cruiser has at least had time to come to some sort of peace with their fate. A few still hold out hope that maybe, just maybe there is some sort of space anomaly interfering with the telemetery of the other ships, but most know that this is unlikely and that some navy has developed a technology which has ended the notion of safety in FTL forever, and that theirs is the misfortune to be perhaps the first the technology has been used against. As the crew awaits their fate, the odd readings start coming in and the bridge crew gets the awful feeling of terror and powerlessness in their stomachs even as the Io breaches their warp bubble and callously extinguishes the last surviving cruiser to have tried to flee from Aneph with cold, unfeeling efficiency. The captain of the Io no longer has a grin on his face, nor is the Io's crew so eager to destroy as they were when they begain their attacks, for they know that what they have done is efficiently eliminated warships crewed by people who were fleeing, and then eventually, undoubtably in terror. Those few cruisers that destroyed themselves by managing to get off shots, the crew realizes, weren't trying to fight them as an enemy, they were trying to fight them as if they were on their deathbeds desperately clinging to life even as the cold cloak of death creeps inexorably on. They have become more than just an enemy ship, to the men and women on the cruisers and perhaps the cruisers themselves if they had feelings, they had become the eternal night, they had become death itself. Not a single person on the Io went unaffected by these feelings, and for the first time, with the multimillion-kilometer long trail of debris stretching behind them, they understood just what kind of vessel they were operating.